As an artist, Lisl Steiner is doubly talented: She is both an excellent draughtswoman and a successful photographic chronicler of our time.

"Things tend to come full circle in life," says Lisl Steiner. She started to draw in her youth, focusing on subjects including famous personalities from the world of music, then went on to become one of the first photojournalists in Latin America. Today, she has turned to drawing again.

The Austrian National Library is indebted to Lisl Steiner in more ways than one. In 1999, she donated her archive of drawings featuring more than 550 portraits of artists, above all musicians, to the Image Archive of the Austrian National Library. It deserves highest recognition that the artist, who was born in Vienna, emigrated to Argentina with her parents in 1938, and today lives in New York, did not forget her old homeland. The Austrian national Library is greatly honored to be able to include these portraits of musicians in the holdings of its Image Archive.

Secondly, Lisl Steiner recently also generously gifted her entire photographic work from her activity as a photojournalist in Argentina and the United States to the Image Archive of the Austrian National Library. Lisl Steiner's diverse and commendable body of work has thus been safeguarded for the future and is available for public use.

This publication is therefore conceived as a sign of thanks and appreciation to Lisl Steiner, a citizen of the world whose work has now been joined with a library with centuries of tradition.

Vienna, October 2004
Dr. Johanna Rachinger
Director General of the Austrian National Library